1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to wireless and long distance carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and information content delivery services/providers and long distance carriers. More particularly, it relates to location services for the wireless industry.
2. Background of the Related Art
Wireless devices, and in particular cell phones, have become ubiquitous with day-to-day life. A majority of people in the United States now own cell phones.
Location services are a more recent advanced feature made available for use with wireless devices, perhaps most notably to provide location of a cell phone. The general goal of location-based services is to automatically provide location-based information to a requesting application. The requesting application may be operating on the wireless device itself, or even on an external application running, e.g., on another device in the wireless or other network. Some exemplary applications that use location services include mapping applications that show interesting places in a vicinity of the wireless device's current global position. Location based services are available for wireless devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) as well as for cell phones.
Cell phones and other wireless devices have become very sophisticated mini-computer devices, capable of running multiple software applications in a time-shared simultaneous manner. Popular operating systems for a wireless device include, e.g., Smartphone™ or PocketPC™, both of which permit simultaneous operation of multiple application programs on a given wireless device.
For various reasons realized by the present inventors, one or multiple location service applications may request location information of a given wireless device generally at the same time, or at least within a short period of time. The location requests may come from applications running on the wireless device itself (e.g., mapping programs), and/or from applications running on other devices within the wireless network or otherwise in communication with the wireless network, e.g., from land-based wired devices. The present inventors have appreciated that such duplicate or closely-timed location requests consume resources in the wireless network as well as the target mobile wireless device, generally causing more network traffic and slower operations of applications.
It is realized by the inventors herein that the conventional location/positioning software engine (e.g., either on a network based device or in a component in the wireless device) cannot properly handle multiple location request transactions grouped closely in time. For example, in North American emergency 9-1-1 location services, a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) may initiate a location request for the position information of a wireless device from which an emergency call is made in very short succession, e.g., every two seconds. However, in current satellite systems a single typical Assisted GPS (AGPS) fix takes about 15 seconds. Multiple location requests within this 15 second or so time period required for a single location fix tends to congest the software positioning engine, not to mention the network, causing most of the concurrent location requests to fail.
There is a need for better management of location requests relating to wireless devices as the number of applications that request location information grow in number, to reduce wireless network traffic and to utilize network resources more efficiently.